Jeremy Gilley - Peace man

Tuesday 20 September 2011 09:36 BST

When Jeremy Gilley first began his Peace One Day movement, he and his mates would hold fundraising gigs and poetry readings in west London pubs and town halls for "a couple of hundred quid here and there". Dyslexic and without a single qualification to his name, save "a D in pottery", Gilley "was nailed at school for being thick. I always thought I was really thick," he says. He also thought the project - an attempt to unite every country of the world in a single day each year of peace and non-violence - would last a year at most.

Twelve years on, Gilley has seen the UN unanimously pass Resolution 55/282, which officially designates September 21 as that day of peace; he's seen thousands of medical workers vaccinate 4.5million children in Afghanistan over successive years as a direct result of a mutual ceasefire on the 21st by both the Western allies and the Taliban; he has visited 76 countries to press his case; and now he is planning the biggest gathering of humans ever recorded, and what he hopes will be the biggest global reduction in violence, as an extraordinary finale to the Olympics next year.

The gigs Gilley puts on nowadays happen at the O2 Arena - Razorlight, Eliza Doolittle, Newton Faulkner, AfroReggae, Youssou N'Dour, Flawless, Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens), plus the English National Ballet are appearing tomorrow for Peace One Day (POD) as a launch concert for the 2012 Global Truce campaign. Next year Gilley and POD have two special concerts planned for the Cultural Olympiad, including Sir Elton John at the Olympic Stadium itself. The man who was once tormented at school for his stupidity, incidentally, also counts Jude Law as a great mate and has a baby daughter with partner Emilia Fox.

So what happened? How did one man do all this?

In person Gilley, 41, is slight and informal and a bit touchy-feely with a passing resemblance to a young Bjorn Borg. He speaks quietly but with a kind of intensity verging on anger. As a child, unhappy at school in Southampton, he was a deep thinker who buried himself in the TV news.

"I was concerned and frightened about what was happening in the world. My mum and dad weren't together, and that creates a bit of tension and makes you think about relationships generally. I was small, and dyslexic, and there was a bit of bullying going on. All those things catapulted together made me try to understand what the news meant."

Partly as an escape, aged 12 he auditioned for the West End musical Bugsy Malone, and wound up getting the lead. Theatre and ballet school followed in London, then a spell at the RSC, where he made many of the contacts that would later prove so useful for POD.

Recently, on one of his many school visits, he was talking to an eight-year-old boy from Newham. "And this boy said to me, 'Your peace day next year won't work. I don't believe it. I can't even walk out of my postcode area in case I get stabbed' Now, how tragic is that? This is as much about the riots in London as it is about conflict anywhere else in the world. It's about domestic violence and bullying in schools, and that's why it has significance for every single person in London."

Gilley originally conceived the idea of Peace One Day as a film - a documentary charting his almost certainly unsuccessful attempt to get world leaders to take the concept of September 21 seriously. (An International Day of Peace already existed, but had no fixed calendar date and " didn't ask anyone to stop fighting," says Gilley,"which was a pretty fundamental flaw.") He and two friends wrote literally thousands of letters - then someone suggested he write to British diplomat Sir Kieran Prendergast, one of the UK's leading diplomats. "I worked it with Sir Kieran for a long time until I was finally sat in his office in New York."

Gilley didn't have the money for the flight to the US to see Sir Kieran and with jaw-dropping tenacity phoned British Airways to beg one for free. "BA have flown me many times around the world for free. And not just me, all my team too. Without them, I honestly couldn't have done this."

It took him 18 months of letter-writing and working the corridors of the UN before an eventual meeting with Kofi Annan. But on September 7, 2001 - "the greatest of my life" - he watched as the resolution enshrining the 21st as the International Day of Peace was passed by the General Assembly. "I sat there alone, with my little camera, and it was a truly wonderful moment. Annan was to give a press conference about the resolution later that week. My crew and I got there at 8am and then, just as we began running the cameras, the first plane hit the World Trade Center " It was September 11. The press conference never happened.

In Gilley's 2008 film The Day After Peace, 9/11 is a pivot. As a direct result he and Jude Law, whom Gilley met through actor Sean Pertwee, found themselves seven years later in Afghanistan, pushing for the ceasefire that allowed the first mass vaccination of children against polio to happen. Far from giving up, the 9/11 attacks made him "even more determined to succeed, to turn this one day into an institution around the world".

Cynics, however, of whom there are many, find Gilley's use of fashionable faces - Angelina Jolie and Stella McCartney are supporters - particularly irritating. How can those living such gilded lives properly understand the real, complex, nasty world?

But Law was more than just a famous name in Afghanistan, insists Gilley."All the running around, all the meetings, Jude did with me. It was a real game-changer because suddenly everybody was interested."

Gilley has found himself in real danger on occasion, not least in the Democratic Republic of Congo when he came face to face with child soldiers. In Somalia he was hospitalised for three weeks. When I ask what the hardest thing about the past 12 years has been, he replies, " the incredible intensity, physically and emotionally, of working 12-hour days every day and of my body just giving up".

Having a daughter, 11-month-old Rose, means he won't travel for months on end any more - though he still expects to visit 20 to 30 countries in the next year, including Somalia, to promote the 2012 campaign. Gilley met Emilia Fox, with whom he lives in Richmond, at a POD concert just as her marriage to Jared Harris was falling apart. He squirms when I ask what it's like joining clan Fox, and blusters about liking to meet the press with Law in tow because no one's interested in him then. Being a father is just the best, he says instead. "For the first time in my life there's something more important than me."

Nowadays Gilley has many important friends, and a recent conversation with the former UN envoy to Afghanistan and special adviser to the Secretary General, Ambassador Lakhdar Brahimi, has sparked a new touchpaper. "I asked him what he would do to rally people around the world to Peace Day 2012, expecting him to say, lobby governments, talk to leaders Instead he replied, 'Go straight to the social media, Jeremy.' I'm guessing he, like everyone, has learned some lessons from the Arab Spring."

So that is what Gilley will do. Next year, a Facebook and Twitter campaign will begin. He says that in Afghanistan on Peace Day 2007, the UN Department of Safety and Security recorded a 70 per cent reduction in violence - a statistic reached by looking at hospital admissions and violent deaths. "If we can do that there, surely we can do it anywhere," says Gilley. "That's the logic behind Peace Day 2012 And if we can do it for a day, perhaps we really can start changing the culture of war to a culture of peace. Because we can't just give up on that eight-year-old in Newham, can we?"

Peace One Day Celebration 2011 is at the O2 Arena tomorrow night (peaceone day.org and tickets from theo2.co.uk and 0844 856 0202)